It's actually better not to care, isn't it? So many agendas, propagandas, and consequential memorandas. Take the middle road. Why can't everyone get along together? Consider opinionated people with disdain. For all his huffing and puffing, the wolf never could blow down the brick house. Emotions are exhausting; passion is volatile and mercurial.

It's better not to care. Stop being so sensitive. Don't wear your heart on your sleeve. Hide it away under a tin veneer, so camouflaged that you'd have to seek out the Wizard at the end of a Yellow Brick Road to reconnoiter its existence. If you have thoughts, if you have feelings, if you have intelligence, it's enough that you know it. It can be a secret, wrapped away from the world. If people know you care, they can twist it around to use you. They'll consider you weak. You'll consider yourself weak for caring so much or for letting other people hurt you. It's only a downward spiral.

Hide away. Hide your thoughts behind the protection of a lighted screen and an anonymous screen name. Let your words swallow up inside your mouth to become a lump in your throat that dissolves painfully. Instead of letting other people's words upset you, let them float from your ears to float in the air, to pop like an inconsequential bubble. It doesn't matter, does it? Worry about yourself. Get away from it all. Find your Emerson self-reliance while living a Thoreau-ian existence. Form your character independently.

Change is inevitable; entropy is inescapably encroaching. People change and grow and grow away. Don't chase after them. It's natural. Let them go. Don't be a hindrance or a bother to them. Don't let nostalgia favorably tint your memories in sepia tones. Your glory days are never as great as you remember them to be, nor are people. You'll always find new people, new relationships wherever you go. Don't grieve over what's lost.

Settle in. Wild dreams are for when you were a child and immature to the ways of the world. Let your original thoughts and aspirations become a laugh in the mouth like the oft-repeated dreams to run away and build a treehouse in the woods with only a plastic compass in hand and a single pbj-sandwich in your backpack. Learn that what you want and what you need to do are two separate, very different endeavors.

Settle down. Passion and love and soulmates only exist in the pages of carefully crafted books. Hide away your worst parts -- they're hard to handle even for yourself. Hide away your best parts -- because in truth, they're entwined with your worst parts. Find someone you subside into a relationship with and can learn to be around. Fall out of love with them, but realize that this happens to everyone. Realize you don't even know what it means to be in love with someone. Be content. Have an incessant nagging feeling that maybe you were meant to do something more, meant for someone more, meant to be...while realizing that you aren't. But it's okay.

It's okay because the alternative is much worse.

Settle, because otherwise you'll spend months and years struggling. Trying to make ends meet. Wandering in self-doubt because of what other people are saying and wondering if you're just being foolish. Settle because this life is only sparsely peppered with those rare, sparkling moments of kismet where everything comes together...and only because you've sweated, cried, and dragged yourself through it. Settle because there's nothing more terrifying than knowing that the probability of brilliance and colossal failure match each other.

Settle because the search for someone you can expose yourself to is hurtful. Because you have to expose yourself to so many different people before finding that one. Because relationships that fail create excruciating growth in spurts and devastating leaps. Settle because it's a startling, bewildering impact to find someone that transcends sex, security, sense. Settle because of the agonizing halting of time when you meet that person suddenly makes it clear what the Beatles meant when all you want is to hold their hand. Settle because it's an irreparable consequence to find a sort of uncontrollable fulfillment in someone else.

Let people go because it's not worth the trouble. It's not worth the effort to tug them back into contact or to hold the memories you had and the promises you made. It's easier to let their faults balloon into a plausible reason to not bother without addressing your own mistakes. It's easier to dismiss people. It's easier to understand that you're just occupying space to them and to let yourself be a third inconsequential wheel when with two others. You can dismiss yourself. Dismiss yourself to the point that you tell yourself they don't care what you do or think because you matter so little. Do it because it hurts much much more to be dismissed by someone else. Do it because you don't want to admit how much they mean to you and how much you want to be meant. Hide away because it's not worth it. Let phone calls go to voicemail. Let your snail mail engagements fall to ruins along with the US Postal Service. Tiptoe your existence.

Do it because new relationships ambulate the same scripted ground that you can navigate easily. Let old hurts go and let consequences and questions from old friendships go. Because to address them means you have to push past the familiar mundane words to the brave uncharted, uncertain new in the relationship, admit to faults, admit that you care. It means you have to argue. To grow painfully. To grow deep roots that are hard to dig up and let go. To expose your best and worst self altogether. Do it because even if you're alone, at least people think of you as the incredible, fierce, lion in the woods, instead of the faked bravado of a coward too intimidated to recognize his own best quality. Do it because to have these old relationships means that you have people that believe in you and expect the best for and from you. Do it because they can encourage you to believe in dangerous thoughts -- that you can defeat insurmountable odds.

Hide away because then you don't have to adjust yourself -- you don't have to make room for others in your heart or learn to give and care and think of others in your space. Don't care because then you search for meaning in your life; you'll want bursts of passion and purpose and beauty. Don't care because life can be a quiet nada nada, etc etc etc for you. Don't care because if you do, you'll find yourself moved by moments where you're tilted back in the seat of a swing, the sweet improbability and mystery of someone's glance, the immediate euphoric sweetness of that first sip of coffee. You'll find moments where there's been an irrevocable change within a relationship when you're suddenly concerned with the proximity of someone's hand to yours.

Do it, because I understand the dangers and I too find myself besieged on all sides by doubt, hurt, loneliness, and the crippling awareness of my imperfection. Do it so that we can exchange mused, weary glances as we pass each other on the street, hurrying to our next engagement -- knowing that we may have missed out on greatness, but at least we missed out on it together.

Do it, because otherwise I'll be encouraged -- encouraged to dare. Encouraged to travel. Encouraged to have experience create stories of unmitigated disasters and inimitable triumphs. Encouraged to open myself and leap into love. Encouraged to risk what I could safely hide away forever -- encouraged to complete the question of a hope in a way that it's forever dashed...but also could be equivocated and exponentially fulfilled. Do it, because I want to be content with holding the hand of someone I'm content with and knowing the sense of the fact that it's just a palm meeting a palm, fingers twisting with fingers. Nothing more.Do it, because otherwise I'll realize how much more I want than what is scripted. How much more I want than even I can plan. How I have a best self - a dazzlingly flawed self - to release, unleash, surrender. And that it's never too late to fly in the face of all that can be conventionally explained.

------This is a sort of pastiche on the written work "You Should Date an Illiterate Girl" by Charles Warnke. His piece is much more succinct and beautiful. I liked the idea and style of it so much, and these are the words that came to mind when I sat to write today.

Ahh no I read Warnke's and he mentioned about getting into arguments about shower curtain mold!!

Reply

The White Rabbit

8/8/2013 04:24:06 pm

It's okay! We never argued about it. ;)

Reply

Alice

8/9/2013 04:26:52 am

Oh okay! Phew!

First Mate

8/12/2013 11:05:06 am

This...pastiche, is wonderfully written, but so hard to read. I'm glad for the ending, because even the notion of actually pursing the ideas contained in the body of this feel so unbelievably wrong that I felt like my stomach was being twisted while I read it. I think if I ever found myself thinking that way, I don't think I could live with myself. To deny possibility by sitting still is like denying hope, achievement, thought, desire, love, value, or any other human characteristic that makes us worth being. And speaking of value, I feel like this pastiche is telling me to hold people as worthless -to trade my time for the presence of nothingness, or in other words, sacrifice myself for someone who doesn't care that I've sacrificed myself for them.

Well again I say, beautifully written. Clearly a piece of art that gets me all worked up!

Reply

Elaine

8/12/2013 11:25:44 am

I hope the pastiche kinda discouraged doing all the things it supposedly said to do. In terms of sacrifice though, I think the things we sacrifice (including ourselves) comes at the cost of not being requited. It shouldn't depend on whether the recipient cares or not. Like the pastiche says -- sometimes we have to dare even when the possibility of failure looms large...but even if we fail, I doubt that it renders our sacrifice to nothing. If that makes sense.